Negritude Research Articles

The Question of Power in Monsieur Toussaint and The Tragedy of King Christophe

The Question of Power in Monsieur Toussaint and The Tragedy of King Christophe Lisbeth Gant-Britton There is a tempting model close at hand—the colonizer.... The first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to that splendid model and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized Two of the most famous plays about Haiti's 1791 indepen­ dence and the years following are Monsieur Toussaint by Edouard Glissant and The Tragedy of King Christophe by Aime Cesaire. Glissant, a leading cultural critic, novelist and playwright from Martinique, and Cesaire, Martinican and founder of the negritude movement, dramatize what Glissant describes as missed oppor­ tunities in postcolonial societies (Caribbean Discourse 87). Written in 1961 and 1963, respectively, at the height of the Third World independence movements from Europe, these dramas serve as stark warnings to African and Caribbean leaders regarding the use and misuse of power. Haitian political scientist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, explains that this phenomenon occurs when some postcolonial leaders are tempted to imitate the very self-serving colonials whom they ousted. He describes the procurement of wealth and privilege which rightly belongs to the people as the struggle of state against nation (163). Through Glissant's and Cesaire's fictional works, we witness the vitiation of the proud revolutionary ideals of Haiti into a stranglehold of tyrannical statehoods which ultimately victimize the very people they initially sought to liberate. For years, Haiti has attracted the attention of writers and historians throughout the Caribbean, since it was the first island in the region to wrest its independence from European control, as well as being the state with the most notorious reputation for autocratic and exploitative rule by its black leaders like Papa Doc Duvalier and successors such as his son, Baby Doc. This fearsome trend was mitigated somewhat by the more populist-oriented leadership of past presi­ dent Jean-Bertrand Aristide. However, Haiti's struggle to amelio-

Assimilés ou patriotes africains ? Naissance du nationalisme culturel en Afrique française (1853-1931)

Abstract Assimiles or African patriots? The Emergence of Cultural Nationalisai in French-speaking Africa (1853-1931). — The French-speaking African educated elite is generally presented as strongly influenced by the colonial policy of Assimilation—at least until the emergence of the negritude movement before the Second World War. This article challenges this view by analyzing texts of local history and ethnography published by Francophone African authors from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. These sources display great pride in African culture, although they are also critical of traditional African society. Many of their authors later became important African politicians and intellectuals. Some played a role in the emergence of negritude. The works of these authors, however, were more than precursors of negritude: they were also attempts to define a modem African culture—one that would retain cultural elements from the past, while discarding oppressive traits of the old society.

A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State

Discourse and practice are interdependent. Practice follows discourse, while discourse is generated by practice. As for the discourse on colonialism, there is a long lineage of engagements with the history of colonialism. One recalls papers by practitioners such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, James Mill, and Thomas Macaulay early on, and critiques of the practice by Hobson, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Schumpeter among many others since the height of imperialism. Numerous metropolitan fiction writers are obsessed by the presence of remote colonies from Melville and Flaubert to Conrad and Gide. Actually, hardly any Western writer from Jane Austen to Thomas Mann, from Balzac to D. H. Lawrence could manage to escape from the spell of modern expansionism. The modern West depends on its colonies for self-definition, as Edward Said's newest book, Culture and Imperialism, argues.' In the area of literary theory and criticism, however, the discourse on colonialism has a surprisingly brief history. One needs to remember that writers of the Negritude Movement and other Third World writers such

West African Poetry. A Critical History

Introduction 1. From oral to written verse: development or depletion? 2. Ladies and gentlemen 3. The Negritude movement 4. Poetry and the university, 1957-63 5. The achievement of Christopher Okigbo 6. Continuity and adaptation in Ghanaian verse, 1952-71 7. Two Ijo poets 8. 'Psalmody of sunsets': the career of Lenrie Peters 9. The road to Idanre, 1959-67 10. The poet and war, 1966-70 11. The poetry of dissent, 1970-80 12. The return to orality A guide to availability Index.

The African Inspiration of the Black Arts Movement

The literary relations between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement have, we believe, been sufficiently documented. It has been demonstrated that Senghor, Damas and Césaire avidly perused the pages of Crisis, Opportunity and Garvey's Negro World—Journals in which Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen and Jean Tommer—the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, first had their poems published. It is equally literary history now, that some of the poems of the Afro-American writers were reprinted in such Parisian Black-oriented journals and little magazines as Les Continents, La Dépêche Africaine, Le Cri des Nègres, La Revue du Monde Noir and Légitime Défense. In this dissemination of ideas across the Atlantic, Paulette Nardal, Edward A. Jones, Louis T. Achille and Mercer Cook played the important role of literary intermediaries through their translations.

Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire

Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire

Negritude and Structuralism

Negritude and Structuralism

Evembe's Sur la terre en passant and the Poetics of Shame

In Sur ta terre en passant, Evembe fashions a poetics of shame from the ordinary experiences of life in a large African city (Yaounde). He does it in such a way that the hallucinatory qualities and scabrous details of one individual's state of consciousness mirror the malaise which characterizes the larger social reality. The protagonist Iyoni (whose name means «shame» in the dialect of Evembe's native Kribi) experiences both misery and social respectability in an environment where traditional values have been lost, only to be replaced by artificial, dehumanizing hierarchies and an attitude of materialistic acquisitiveness. Despite the mysterious illness which is eroding his will to live, Iyoni always attempts to maintain a dignified pose, and he seeks to project his own poetic sensitivity and his morality of love and compassion onto the larger social fabric, but his physical body proves incapable of sustaining his ideals, and when he regards himself as a machine which ingests food and ejects clots of blood and excrement, he has begun to lose confidence in himself as a loving, feeling person capable of working toward a more noble social order. The resultant anxiety and shame permeate Evembe's novel, which has been undeservedly neglected due to its implicit antiestablishment critique of church, state, and the Negritude movement.

Rene Maran, The New Negro and Negritude

Rene Maran, The New Negro and Negritude

The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor

The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor

Negritude and Negation: The Poetry of Tchikaya U'Tamsi

Negritude and Negation: The Poetry of Tchikaya U'Tamsi

Negritude and The New Breed

Negritude and The New Breed

The Semantics of Negritude

The Semantics of Negritude

A Touch of Negritude

A Touch of Negritude

Negritude: Evaluation and Elaboration

Negritude: Evaluation and Elaboration

Negritude, Socialism and the Law

Negritude, Socialism and the Law